Word of Salvation – Vol. 45 No. 36 – September 2000

 

God's Only-begotten Son, The Virgin Birth Of Christ

 

Sermon by Rev. M. P. Geluk on Lord's Day 14 (Heidelberg Catechism)

Scripture Readings: John 8: 48-59; Hebrews 2: 14-18

Suggested Hymns: BoW 161; 331; 520; 105:1, 6

 

Beloved in the Lord.

We are looking at the article of the Apostles' Creed that says: I believe in Jesus Christ who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary.  As you can see, it's all about THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF CHRIST.

1.  It is a matter of faith

A 'virgin birth' is, of course, an impossibility.  A woman who gives birth to a baby is a woman who has been impregnated with male sperm.  The male should be the husband who is married to her.  Medical science today can have a woman conceive outside of marriage and without a husband.  But a woman will not become pregnant if there is no sperm to fertilise her ovum.  But that's what happened to Mary and because that's not possible according to science and reason, people have walked away from the Christian faith.

But many people who respect the undisputed facts of science and appreciate the place of reason and logic, accept the virgin birth of Christ with their Christian faith.  They do not even attempt to re-interpret the Bible's teaching on this matter.  They regard the Word of God as having the highest authority.  And they take very seriously God's warning in the Bible not to tamper with what He is saying because His ways are not like our ways and His thoughts not like our thoughts.

The virgin birth of Christ is clearly a very important part in God's plan of salvation.  And although we cannot fully understand it, we have to accept it in faith.  For if we don't believe that Christ got His human nature through the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit in Mary's womb, then Joseph must be His human father.  But that will make Christ the same as any other human child.  And like everyone else, He, too, will then have a sinful nature.

It also means Jesus is no longer God.  And if He is no longer God but just another mortal, then we don't have a perfect Saviour any more.  A Christ who is only human will be nothing more to us than an imperfect sinful teacher and example.  And we have plenty of those already.  But none can take our sin and guilt away.  In fact, they themselves need saving from their own sin and guilt.

But what about Mary?  She too was sinful, and being Jesus' mother, how come the Lord did not receive a sinful nature from her?  The answer lies in what God said through the angel to Mary, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.  So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God" (Lk.1:35).  This mysterious work of the Holy Spirit on Mary's body prevented her sinful nature from being passed on to Jesus.  It is the holiness of the Spirit that made the child Jesus holy.

You see, in order to save sinners, God decided that He in the person of His Son would become man Himself.  The first Adam had failed to obey God and his nature became deadly diseased with sin.  All the descendants of the first Adam are infected with the same problem from conception on.  So to bring salvation to the sinful children of Adam, Christ became the second Adam, another human being, but this time in a different way.  He had to remain the Son of God, so a human father was out of the question.

The first Adam was also a son of God (Lk.3:38), not having a human father or mother.  But somehow the devil was successful in having the first Adam disobey God.  Christ, the second Adam was also fully human.  God used the womb of Mary to bring Christ into the world.  It may well mean that Jesus had something of Mary's human nature, probably even looked like her, but through that mysterious work of the Holy Spirit on Mary, Jesus remained the sinless, holy One of God.  That miraculous work of God in Mary didn't make Mary special, which is what the Roman Catholic Church believes, it made Christ special.

2.  It's God coming down to us

There are a number of pagan stories from Greek and Roman mythology that tell weird tales about gods having intercourse with mortals and producing an off-spring half-God and half-man.  The biblical account of Mary being 'overshadowed' by the Holy Spirit has nothing in common with those kinds of stories.

We should see the miracle of the eternal Son of God taking to Himself a truly human nature from the flesh and blood of Mary as a climax to God's dealings with man in the time of the Old Testament.  Christ becoming man whilst remaining God was in itself not something new for in Old Testament times the angel of the Lord appeared a number of times.  What was new when Mary became involved was Christ being conceived and born in a human womb.

What I mean is this.  God also visited Abraham.  He was sitting near the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day, trying to catch a bit of a breeze, no doubt, when he looked up and saw three men standing nearby (Gen.18:1ff).  It turned out that one of them was the Lord Himself, and the other two men were normal angels.  Here we have the Creator of the world taking on for a brief moment of time human form.  It was as real as you and I being here.  God stopped to have lunch with Abraham.  They ate meat from a calf, hastily prepared by a servant, as well as curds and milk.

It's all part and parcel of God coming down to sinful man in his lost condition.  The whole history of salvation is all about that.  The salvation of sinners is never about us climbing up to God, it has always been about God coming down to us.  Go back all the way to Genesis.  What happened when Adam and Eve fell into sin, which was a fall away from God?  God came down from heaven to look for them.  "Where are you," He cried (Gen.3:9).

God also came down to His people Israel whilst they travelled through the wilderness.  The tabernacle was constructed for this very purpose.  A holy dwelling for God so that He could be with His people.  The tabernacle really means 'the meeting tent'.  It was pulled down whenever the people had to move on and put up again whenever they camped in a new place.  In this tent, God would speak with Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend (Ex.33:11).

When Israel finally left the wilderness and settled in the Promised Land, and in due course the temple was built in Jerusalem to replace the movable tabernacle, then God had a permanent address.  Although He remained invisible in the temple, every pious Israelite knew God was present among His people.  Many times the psalmist spoke of going to the house of the Lord to behold the face of the Lord and bow in His presence.

Then in the fullness of time, God, in the Person of His eternal Son Jesus Christ, came to stay with His people in the flesh.  What really happened was not so much 'God becoming man' as we often say and sing.  For Christ did not cease being God.  The Catechism has it biblically correct when it says:
            "That the eternal Son of God,
             who is and remains true and eternal God,
             took to Himself ... a truly human nature."

Christ did not stop being God.  He added human nature to His divine being.  John could write in his letter, "We have heard Him, seen Him with our eyes and touched Him with our hands" (1:1).  He is talking about Christ as God.

Now that's the remarkable thing about the virgin birth of Christ.  It means that God has come down to us.  He had already done so in short visits to Adam and Eve, and to Abraham and to Samson's parents.  Then in a more slightly permanent form in the tabernacle, and then the temple, although there He was invisible.  Finally He was born of Mary and it was very visible that in Christ God had come down to His covenant people, teaching and doing the things of the kingdom of heaven.  Yes, in Christ heaven had come to earth.

Why is it that people so often think of having to climb up to God when it is God who has come down to us.  The devil tricked our first parents into thinking that they would become like God if they ate from the forbidden fruit.  They believed him.  Adam and Eve somehow stopped realising that what they were and had in paradise was already the best.  It would never become any better.  Because of their sin they lost it all.  Trying to become like God, they ended up being separated from Him.  But in the fullness of time, God became like us and fellowship with God was made possible again.  The road of redemption does not run from earth to heaven but from heaven to earth.

It was always God's intention to save the world, which He created.  Because the world has become such a crooked place, we tend to think that salvation consists of having to escape it and going to heaven.  It's true, the children of God who die in this present world leave their bodies behind and their souls go to be with the Lord in heaven.  But that's only a temporary measure.  God's plan has always been to re-create this earth and make it perfect again and to have all His people live on this new perfect, physical, and material world in their new and glorified spiritual bodies.  And that's what will happen at Jesus' second coming.

Man himself cannot bring about this new world.  Yet he is always trying.  But history has shown repeatedly that man cannot do it.  Only God can achieve a new world, a new humanity.  But God follows His ways and His thoughts and they are unlike ours.  He does it by having the eternal Son of God, who is and remains God, take on a truly human nature from the flesh and blood of the virgin Mary.  It is God coming down to us.  And, of course, this is a real miracle.  But it is a miracle to us only because it goes contrary to God's usual laws in nature.  To God it is not really a miracle.  It is Him working according to His grace and power.

To convince us of this, yes, to prepare us for it, God used a couple of births that were humanly impossible.  He promised Abraham and Sarah descendants among whom would be Mary and from whom Christ would be born.  That meant Abraham and Sarah had to have a son.  But God deliberately waited until every human possibility was exhausted.

Abraham and Sarah even tried adoption – a son from Abraham and Hagar.  But no, that was not God's plan either.  Well, finally a son was born.  Isaac was a miracle baby.  What was the point of God keeping Abraham and Sarah waiting so long?  To show that salvation is by His grace and power.  Not by man's efforts and human calculations but by God's ways and God's thoughts.

God again did a similar thing with Zechariah and Elizabeth.  They were promised a son who would set the stage for Christ – raise the curtain, so to speak.  But once more, God did it when man's way could no longer do it.  Elizabeth, too, was an old woman when she gave birth.  Humanly speaking it had become impossible.

Then, of course, Christ being born of the virgin Mary was all according to God's ways and thoughts.  But all these wonderful, miraculous ways of God in the saving of sinners were done on this earth.  God coming down to us.  They were not done in heaven, for us to climb up there, and leaving this world to its wicked fate.  No, God works out His salvation plans in this world.  He saves sinners here.  He doesn't save them in heaven.  He transforms them right here in this sinful world and then He tells these saved sinners to transform the world around them.

3.  It was an act of love that brought humiliation

The eternal Son of God taking to Himself a human nature by being born of a woman was an act of love.  "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son so that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life."  The giving of His Son out of love for sinners did not begin with Christ's suffering and crucifixion.  It began when He was born.

When in Old Testament times the eternal Christ as the angel of the Lord became man a few times then it was always as an adult and then only for some moments in order to bring a special message.  Finally, in the fullness of time, Christ did not come down for another brief visit.  He stayed.  And He began His time among us, first as a foetus in the womb, then as a child, then a teenager, and then when He was a mature adult He began His public ministry.

And that ministry was not just a brief message every now and then.  No, it was a continual and unbroken teaching and demonstration of the ways of the kingdom of God among people living here in this world.  Not away from this world, not in some after-life, as the eastern religions teach, but right here in this life and in this broken and suffering world.  And the eternal Son of God, whilst He remained God, began right from the beginning of our human existence, in the womb.

The Bible tells us that for Christ this was a humbling experience.  Philippians 2, and similar passages, say that Christ is, and has always been, in His very nature God.  He is equal with God, is one with God, and is God.  But He willingly let go of that glorious existence in heaven.  He did not hang on to it, but made Himself nothing.  That is, He took on the very nature of a servant.  He obeyed His Father whose will it was to come down to us through His Son to save us from our sin.  And so Christ, by His own will and His Father's will, was made in human likeness.

Elsewhere this laying down of His glory by Christ is described like this: "...though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich" (2Cor.8:9).  Yes, if Christ was born of a mother who was high up in society, say a queen and rich, if His adopted father Joseph was a king, if Jesus was born in a palace, could we then still say that for our sakes He became poor?

There are more people like Mary and Joseph than there are queens and kings.  More children are born in primitive and humble surroundings than in palaces.  So Christ, the King of heaven and earth, was born in an animal shed and placed in a feeding trough animals eat out of.  It was the humblest and poorest.  The Saviour of man became that humble so that even He, the eternal Son of God, can identify with the poorest of the poor who live in shacks and gutters.

One day all believers, rich and poor, will share the glory that Christ had before He left heaven to come down to our rescue (Jn.17:24), and which He took up again after He ascended into heaven.  When we see Him in His glory then we will know how much He must have loved us, for Him to become like us.

4.  It is necessary to restore life from its very beginning

Why did Christ first have to be a baby?  Why did He not become flesh as an adult, like He briefly did with Abraham?  Could He not just have materialised somewhere in Israel and begin His public ministry as an adult?  After all, the first Adam was put on the earth not as a baby but as a mature adult.  So why not the same with the second Adam, Christ?  In fact, that's what the gospels of Mark and John do.  When Jesus comes on the scene for the first time in their gospels then it is Him, as an adult, coming to John the Baptist to be baptised in the river Jordan.  It's only Matthew and Luke that begin with Jesus' conception and birth and all the events around it.

The answer must be that Christ's miraculous conception and virgin birth help to explain that He is God and from God.  It was necessary for Christ, the second Adam, to restore life right from the beginning – from conception and birth to death.  All human beings are now conceived in sinfulness.  I do not mean that sexuality and the physical union between husband and wife are sinful, but that we conceive our children as people with a sinful human nature.  This sinfulness in human nature is passed on to our children – they are born with it as well.  They are not sinless.  And they grow up as children and teenagers with that sinful nature in them.  It never leaves us.  And we die because of it.

So, for Christ to do something about that sinful nature, to reverse the whole process, He had to start from the beginning and be conceived and born and live as a child, teenager and adult, without that sinful nature.  He had to have a human life the same as ours in all respects except the sinfulness.  We can now look to Him as our Saviour not only as adults but also as babies, children and teenagers – yes, at whatever stage of life we may be.  He can remove our sin at whatever age we might be.

The Bible does not spend much time on Jesus' life as a child or teenager.  Nor does it go into great detail how Jesus coped with the various ups and downs of life as we humans face them.  There is no need to.  We are saved by His sinless life at whatever stage of life we might be.  It is not a matter of children having to observe the child Jesus in order to be a good child.  Nor do teenagers need a teenage Jesus to show them how to live the right way.  We should not even say to our youth, "I hope that one day, when you are grown up, you will be like Jesus."  We should not think that we have to be a replica Jesus.  But what we need to do is to believe that Christ, the eternal Son of God, took to Himself a truly human nature in order to restore new life to us, which is not subject to sin and death as ours is now.

We and our children need to be saved.  Whenever a new human being is born we should rejoice, but we also realise that its whole existence lies in the shadow of the inescapable forces of sin and death.  But thanks to be to God, He has come down to us in Christ, and began our human life right from its beginning, as a foetus in the womb, then as a baby, an infant, a child, a teenager, and an adult.  And every stage of that human life can now be saved and sanctified by His perfect life.

There is now no condemnation for all those who are in Christ Jesus.  Young or old, in Christ, they have a new hope.  And you know what that means in real practical terms?  There is no need for those nasty abortions, there is no need for infanticide, and there is no need for suicide.  Why kill and murder life when Christ has come to save life?  He restores life right from the beginning.

So there is hope for all, also for deformed babies, for Down Syndrome children, for the mentally impaired, for the insane, yes, even for murderers, rapists, yes, for all human beings, broken, flawed and damaged by the fall into sin.

Amen.